Introduction: Urban knowledge and the politics of governing cities

There has been much debate recently, in urban studies and popular literature, about the supposedly increasing role of knowledge in the contemporary ways of governing and planning cities. This includes work on a move towards ‘knowledge-based’ models of governance (Anderson and Atkinson, 2013), emerging ‘knowledge-economies’ (Florida, 2002, 2004), and the increasing popularity of novel formats of public experimentation (Karvonen and van Heur, 2013; Evans et al., 2016). Likewise, mounting work on ‘smart’ cities has documented the actual, or potential, penetration of urban life by complex digital dataspaces (Coletta et al., 2018; Karvonen et al., 2018). Such diagnoses have been accompanied both by optimistic visions of increasing civic participation, socio-economic ‘creativity’ and sustainability, as well as by warnings about the rise of technocratic forms of power (Raco and Savini, 2019).